The Heart's Cry: Psalm 109

Psalm 109

I greatly dislike calls from telemarketers but recently I have been getting more so may the Lord cast them from the Lord's sight, may they fall down to the depths and have their friends despise them. May their significant others turn their love from them and may they fall to ruin.

I had to call a company at 11:30 pm on a Sunday night because they did not remove a fee that they said they would remove but instead threatened to disconnect my service because the fee has not been removed, may the Lord bring there joy to ashes, may the Lord cause them pain upon pain, physical, mental, spiritual till they lay on the ground begging for death. May all their endeavors come to naught, may their pleading words fall on deaf ears and may they grovel for food and receive none.

If I took every scripture as the way I should act in my life statements like the above would be a part of my everyday life, God forbid. But, some people would use the following verse to prove such a point, "All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped for every good work." 2 Timothy 3:16-17 Oftentimes you can use scripture as an example of the correct way to go about things, but some scriptures should only ever be used as an example of what not to do, how not to act. We should perhaps ask, 'What would Jesus do?' but there are some Biblical characters where we should instead ask, 'What wouldn't this person do?' and most of the people in the Bible have both good and bad actions, much like you and I have good and bad actions.

It is of utmost importance for us to read the Bible through the lens of Jesus, of God's grace and mercy and love seeing the times when we should act the same and seeing the times when we should act contrary to the central figures in the Bible. We should act like Abraham in that if God calls us we should go. We should act contrary to Abraham in that we should never tell someone that our spouse is our sibling in order to escape possible punishment. We should be like David in being a person after God's own heart, but we should shy away from his occasional rape, murder, and polygamy. Only by reading with the right perspective can we understand the story of the Bible, understand which parts are to be upheld and will sustain us and which are to be shown for what they are, archaic stories of archaic people doing archaic things.

+ Be honest with yourself, how often have you wanted to say something similar to my first two statements?

+ How has reading the Bible through the lens of Jesus helped you to better understand the scripture? Has it ever caused things to become more blurry?